1968 Convention Speech

Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Domino Theory,” 7 April 1954 After being questioned in a news conference, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the phrase “domino theory” to explain his desire to have the United States intervene in Indochina (Vietnam) in order to halt the expansion of communism. Q. Robert Richards, Copley Press: Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? THE PRESIDENT. You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things. First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs. Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world. Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. … Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can't afford greater losses. But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people. …

So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.

Lyndon B. Johnson, “Peace without Conquest,” April 6, 1965 In this speech, President Johnson outlines his justifications for escalating the war in Vietnam. Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change. This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania. It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Vietnam. Vietnam is far away from this quiet campus. We have no territory there, nor do we seek any. The war is dirty and brutal and difficult. And some 400 young men, born into an America that is bursting with opportunity and promise, have ended their lives on Vietnam's steaming soil. Why must we take this painful road? Why must this nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away? We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure. This kind of world will never be built by bombs or bullets. Yet the infirmities of man are such that force must often precede reason, and the waste of war, the works of peace. We wish that this were not so. But we must deal with the world as it is, if it is ever to be as we wish. …. It is a war of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large-scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities. The confused nature of this conflict cannot mask the fact that it is the new face of an old enemy. Over this war -- and all Asia -- is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peking. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is a nation which is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Vietnam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes. Why are these realities our concern? Why are we in South Vietnam? We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Vietnam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to help South Vietnam defend its independence. And I intend to keep that promise. To dishonor that pledge, to abandon this small and brave nation to its enemies, and to the terror that must follow, would be an unforgivable wrong.

We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s word. The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war. We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Vietnam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in southeast Asia -- as we did in Europe -- in the words of the Bible: “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” … There are those who wonder why we have a responsibility there. Well, we have it there for the same reason that we have a responsibility for the defense of Europe. World War II was fought in both Europe and Asia, and when it ended we found ourselves with continued responsibility for the defense of freedom. Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam, and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves -- only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.

Martin Luther King, Jr, "Beyond Vietnam," April 4, 1967

Martin Luther King gave this speech a year before he was assassinated at a gathering of religious leaders protesting the Vietnam War. Some civil rights leaders believed that King was making a mistake by linking the anti-war movement to civil rights, but he believed that they were similar moral issues and that he should speak out about the war. In this speech, he talks about how the war negatively impacts Black Americans and Americans in general.

… There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America [civil rights]. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent….

[MLK tries to imagine what the Vietnamese think of the Americans – it’s definitely not that they are heroes liberating them.] At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor…..

It is with such activity that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered….

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

Akmed Lorence, “Transcript,” 1967 Akmed Lorence was a Black Vietnam veteran who was interviewed in 1967 for a documentary which explored the black anti-war movement in New York City. This document is a transcript of some of his comments during the film. Different scenes are divided by asterisks. I had about sixty days left, sixty-four, sixty-five days left of doing, in the Nam, down south and I was singing a song I made up from another tune, and it was “Snobby Going Back to Where the Rats and the Roaches Roam,” and this guy next to me, said to me, “what do you mean, you got rats in your house?” So I turned to him, and he was a honk [white man], I turned to him and I said, “yeah, I got rats and roaches in my house, don’t you have any in yours?” And he said to me, no, and he’d never seen a rat. And it started me thinking because soon I would be going back home and he would be going back home. I would be going back to the rats and the roaches, because I knew they were there. And if you come home right now, you can hear them if you’re eating in my kitchen; you’ll hear them talking. And he would be going back to his nice California pad. And for me, the problem would begin again, and for him there would be no problem. *** We were in this foxhole and the CO, he was one of the most scared people I’ve ever seen doing any kind of an operation, and we were being artilleried by the North Vietnamese artillery batteries in the DMZ, the mountain areas. And he was speaking to another lieutenant and he was saying, “the coons are getting out of hand.” He looked over at the other corner of the bunker and he saw me, and he quickly changed his statement from “coo’ … to colored people are getting out of hand.” Now, right away it doesn’t make me feel like I want to help him or I want to serve his cause. And from before I didn’t have any kind of a feeling for it to start with. *** I have been made even more angry by going to Vietnam and having to contribute and seeing black youth die in Vietnam and still yet coming back and no one wants to listen to us; no one wants to hear what we have to say, and no one wants to do anything for us. We’re still being treated as sub-humans. I’ve come back from Vietnam and I’ve seen the things in my neighborhood. I walk through the alleys and the alleys are piling high with garbage. I see young children, young black children running through the streets. They don’t have the proper clothes on. And it’s not the same old lie that their parents don’t want to work. That is not the case. The case is they can’t find jobs. *** You know, I think one of the worst mistakes that the Man has ever made is to think that we would be fool enough to be trained in warfare and still yet come back home, watch our people live in misery, die in misery, and still be stupid enough not to want to help our people.

Now if the people on the street, the people in the so-called riots. I call them revolts. If the people in the revolts are to be shot down and killed, then I don’t think there is any brother who is going to stand around knowing what he can do and knowing what he is capable of putting out, he’s going to stand around and watch his own people get shot down. If a man on the street dies, I die. If this country ever decides to exterminate black people, I’m sure they are not going to exclude me because I’ve been in Vietnam. They’re going to exterminate all black people and that includes all Vietnam veterans. *** But they’re not going to do it. If the United States government were ever to pull out of Vietnam and you asked them what happened to the 80 billion dollars they spent in Vietnam. Why can’t they put it in our black communities? They’re going to say they don’t have the money. Well, where did all the money disappear to?

Gallup Poll

The Gallup Poll is a public opinion poll that collects answers from a cross section of the American population. It’s generally considered non-partisan and trustworthy.

Gallup Poll 1965-1968: Sending U.S. Troops to Vietnam Was …

2/1968 1/1967 8/1965

A mistake 46% 32% 24%

Not a mistake 42 52 60

No opinion 12 16 15

Excerpts from the Kerner Report, Feb. 29, 1968 In July 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed an eleven-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to explain the riots that plagued U.S. cities since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. He asked for answers to three basic questions about the riots: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again? The lengthy report quickly became a best-seller. Quite harsh in its criticisms of federal policy, white racism, and media coverage of the riots, the report offered a number of specific recommendations. Martin Luther King, Jr., called it a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” However, Johnson did not implement any of the recommendations. One month after the report was issued, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., led to riots in over 100 American cities. Introduction The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation. The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities. On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States established this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions: What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country. This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal. Reaction to last summer’s disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American. This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution. To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values. The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society. This alternative will require a commitment to national action — compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will. The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.

Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot — it will not —tolerate coercion and mob rule. Violence and destruction must be ended—in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people. Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it. It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens — urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group. Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:

1. To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems; 2. To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap

between promise and performance; 3. To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and

frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society. These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation’s conscience. . . . Chapter 2—Patterns of Disorder Although specific grievances varied from city to city, at least 12 deeply held grievances can be identified and ranked into three levels of relative intensity: First Level of Intensity 1. Police practices 2. Unemployment and underemployment 3. Inadequate housing Second Level of Intensity 4. Inadequate education 5. Poor recreation facilities and programs 6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms. Third Level of Intensity 7. Disrespectful white attitudes 8. Discriminatory administration of justice 9. Inadequacy of federal programs 10. Inadequacy of municipal services 11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices 12. Inadequate welfare programs

The background of disorder is often as complex and difficult to analyze as the disorder itself. But we find that certain general conclusions can be drawn:

 Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it.

 Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school.  Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in

unskilled and service jobs.  Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice

as likely to be living in poverty.  Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing — three times as

likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced.

A study of the aftermath of disorder leads to disturbing conclusions. We find that, despite the institution of some post-riot programs:

 Little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. Actions to ameliorate Negro grievances have been limited and sporadic; with but few exceptions, they have not significantly reduced tensions.

 In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.

 In several cities, increasing polarization is evident, with continuing breakdown of inter- racial communication, and growth of white segregationist or black separatist groups. . . .

Robert F. Kennedy, Speech at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 On the campaign trail, Kennedy took the opportunity to discuss his views on the Vietnam War, the disaffection of American youth, and poverty. The speech splits into two pieces: the first deals with the problems Kennedy sees at home – poverty, violence, and a lack of purpose – and the end presents his views on the War in Vietnam, which he believes is immoral and destroying America’s soul. Why spend time, money, and American lives in Vietnam when there’s so much to fix in America? . . . This morning I spoke about the war in Vietnam, and I will speak briefly about it in a few moments. But there is much more to this critical election year than the war in Vietnam. It is, at a root, the root of all of it, the national soul of the United States. The President calls it "restlessness." Our cabinet officers, such as John Gardiner and others tell us that America is deep in a malaise of spirit: discouraging initiative, paralyzing will and action, and dividing Americans from one another, by their age, their views and by the color of their skin and I don't think we have to accept that here in the United States of America. Demonstrators shout down government officials and the government answers by drafting demonstrators. Anarchists threaten to burn the country down and some have begun to try, while tanks have patrolled American streets and machine guns have fired at American children. I don't think this a satisfying situation for the United States of America. …. And if we seem powerless to stop this growing division between Americans, who at least confront one another, there are millions more living in the hidden places, whose names and faces are completely unknown - but I have seen these other Americans - I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi - here in the United States - with a gross national product of $800 billion dollars - I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven't developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children, so that their lives are not destroyed, I don't think that's acceptable in the United States of America and I think we need a change…. I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever greater promises of equality and of justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddled in the same filthy rooms - without heat - warding off the cold and warding off the rats. If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America. And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of

material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world. From the beginning our proudest boast has been the promise of Jefferson, that we, here in this country would be the best hope of mankind. And now, as we look at the war in Vietnam, we wonder if we still hold a decent respect for the opinions of mankind and whether the opinion maintained a descent respect for us or whether like Athens of old, we will forfeit sympathy and support, and ultimately our very security, in the single-minded pursuit of our own goals and our own objectives. I do not want, and I do believe that most Americans do not want, to sell out America's interest to simply withdraw - to raise the white flag of surrender in Vietnam - that would be unacceptable to us as a people, and unacceptable to us as a country. But I am concerned about the course of action that we are presently following in South Vietnam. I am concerned, I am concerned about the fact that this has been made America's War. It was said, a number of years ago that this is "their war" "this is the war of the South Vietnamese" that "we can help them, but we can't win it for them" but over the period of the last three years we have made the war and the struggle in South Vietnam our war, and I think that's unacceptable…. I think that this is a question of the people of South Vietnam… I don't think it's up to us here in the United States, to say that we're going to destroy all of South Vietnam because we have a commitment there. The commander of the American forces at Ben Tre said we had to destroy that city in order to save it. So 38,000 people were wiped out or made refugees. We here in the United States - not just the United States government, not just the commanders of and forces in South Vietnam, the United States government and every human being that's in this room - we are part of that decision and I don't think that we need do that any longer and I think we should change our policy.